When the Church banned cousins marrying in the Middle Ages it may have led to some very unexpected results, from rising individualism to more generous blood donation, according to new research.
It seems, perhaps counterintuitively, that the Roman Catholic Church’s rules on marriage have produced not only more children, but also more independent thinking and less conformity among the broader Western population.
If these findings appear a little weird, that’s appropriate. The research is focused on the impact of the Church’s rules on marriage in Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic societies – a segment known by the acronym WEIRD.
Jonathan Schulz and colleagues from George Mason University and Harvard University in the US wanted to know why people from WEIRD societies are, well, different.
“Western Europeans and their cultural descendants in North America and Australia tend to be more individualistic, independent, analytically minded, and impersonally prosocial (e.g., trusting of strangers) while revealing less conformity, obedience, in-group loyalty, and nepotism,” the authors write in the journal Science....